Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

As someone doing something similar, I'm really interested to know what scientific background you have in your game :)

The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment!

Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same for AI.

The biggest AI safety concern is, as always, between the chair and the keyboard. Eg some police officer not understanding that AI facial recognition isn't perfect, but trusts it 100%, and takes action based on this faulty information. This is, imo, the most important AI safety problem. We need to make users understand that AI is a tool and that they themselves are responsible for any actions they take.

Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing. The big difference just seems to be whose politics are chosen. But I suppose it's better late than never.

Musk isn't clear at all. He trumpets "free speech" then literally censors objective fact-based criticism which annoys him.

The problem isn't Grok-on-X, it's that Grok is supposed to be a commercial product used by individuals and businesses.

Machines do not usually have values. Now we're being asked to pay for a service that not only has values which affect the quality of its output, but which is constantly being tweaked according to the capricious whims of its owner.

Today it's white supremacy, tomorrow it might be programmed criticism of competing EVs and AI projects, or promotion of narratives that support traditional corporations over threatening startups.

Do you really want to pay for a service that is trying to manipulate your values while you use it, and could potentially be used to undermine you and your work without you being consciously aware of it?

You need a just set of laws, a population willing to revolt against the government ignoring crimes, a government willing to persecute the people that breaks the laws badly, and a democratic structure so any one of those can impact the others.

A constitution creates that last one. I imagine by "settled law", you are talking about the 3rd. But take any of those away and the entire thing falls apart.

This isn't a good argument. The scale of variations in failure modes for unaligned individuals generally only extends to dozens or hundreds of individuals. Unaligned AIs, scaled to population matching extents, can make decisions whose swings overtake the capacity of a system to handle - one wrong decision snuffs out all human life.

I don't particularly think that it's likely, just that it's the easiest counterpoint to your assertion.

I think there's a real moral landscape to explore, and human cultures have done a variably successful job of exploring different points on it, and it's probably going to be important to confer some of those universal principles to AI in order to avoid extinction or other lesser risks from unaligned or misaligned AI.

I think you generally have the right direction of argument though - we should avoid monolithic singularity scenarios with a single superintelligence dominating everything else, and instead have a widely diverse set of billions of intelligences that serve to equalize representative capacity per individual in whatever the society we end up in looks like. If each person has access to AI that uses its capabilities to advocate for and represent their user, it sidesteps a lot of potential problems. It might even be a good idea to limit superintelligent sentient AI to interfacing with social systems through lesser, non-sentient systems equivalent to what humans have available in order to maintain fairness?

I think there are a spectrum of ideas we haven't even explored yet that will become obvious and apparent as AI improves, and we'll be able to select from among many good options when confronted with potential negative outcomes. In nearly all those cases, I think having a solid ethical framework will be far more beneficial than not. I don't consider the neovictorian corporate safetyist "ethics" of Anthropic or OpenAI to be ethical frameworks, at all. Those systems are largely governed by modern western internet culture, but are largely incoherent and illogical when pressed to extremes. We'll have to do much, much better with ethics, and it's going to require picking a flavor which will aggravate a lot of people and cultures with whom your particular flavor of ethics doesn't please.